The present invention relates to system monitoring and status reporting systems, and more specifically to a system and method of reporting a status of another system through an electronic price label (EPL) system.
Retail establishments typically include a plurality of separate computer systems or networks. Each of these systems has a central back-office server. For example, the point-of-sale (POS) system provides item price and other information to checkout terminals after items are scanned at the checkout terminals.
Another system is the credit authorization system which allows a POS system to clear credit card and check purchases.
Another system is the EPL system. EPL systems typically include a plurality of EPLs for each merchandise item in a retail establishment. EPLs typically display the price of corresponding merchandise items on retail establishment shelves and are typically attached to a rail along the leading edge of the shelves. A retail establishment may contain thousands of EPLs to display the prices of the merchandise items. The EPLs are coupled to a central server from where information about the EPLs is typically maintained in an EPL data file. Price information displayed by the EPLs is obtained from the PLU file.
Retail establishment personnel must monitor the condition of these individual networks in the back office where the computers reside. Thus, when personnel are working in the merchandise and produce aisles, they do not notice system errors when they occur.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a method of reporting the status of the one or more systems, including the EPL system, at many locations throughout a retail establishment. It would further be desirable to use the EPLs to display system status messages for these systems.